Guest blog post guidelines

The PLE Learning Exchange supports organizations across Ontario in developing and delivering effective public legal education and information (PLE) for their communities. We showcase examples of interesting PLE projects and provide an interactive online space to help organizations working with PLE ask questions, build partnerships, and share experiences and learnings.

PLExchange is the PLE Learning Exchange’s blog. Our mission is to create an open forum for ideas and exchange of information about PLE.

Topics

We welcome articles based on the following topics:

innovative PLE projects that you’ve heard about or worked on in Ontario or other jurisdictions

your take on access to justice initiatives or concepts and how they might influence PLE work on the ground

All guest posts must be useful to this blog’s audience – people who engage in or are interested in PLE activities.

The post must not include marketing-related links. Any links to external content will be subject to approval by the post editor before publishing the post. In the ordinary course, links to the author’s non-profit organization or workplace will be added to the post content where appropriate.

Submission Guidelines

If you have an idea for an unsolicited guest post, please contact Kristina Brousalis, the blog’s moderator, to discuss before preparing the post.

This blog features relatively informal and short post content, with a typical word count of 250 – 500 words per post.

All guest posts should include the author’s bio and a link to the author’s website/blog, which we will publish as well. Please also include telephone and Email contact information when submitting the post. Should the author wish to include a headshot, logo or other organizational image, that would also be welcome. Images are accepted as .jpg files. You must have permission to use an image and proper attribution is required.

Formatting

Please send your draft post in the text portion of an Email or in Microsoft Word .doc format. HTML formatting is not required.

When drafting your guest post, please consider the following in order to improve readability of the post:

subheadings in the post body

short paragraphs or bullet points (to make the post easier to read)

Editing

We reserve the right to edit posts for length, spelling and grammar and to facilitate final formatting in the style suggested above under “Formatting”. Please do not be offended if we suggest changes to your post. If major changes are suggested, you will be contacted and given an opportunity to comment on proposed edits prior to posting.

Please note that guest posts will be edited to fit within a parameter of 250 – 500 words per post. If you have a longer article you’d like us to feature, we would consider including your synopsis of the article’s contents and posting it with a link to the article on your website.

Publishing

Publishing of the blog post will be done at the discretion of the PLE Learning Exchange. We reserve the right to decline publishing any post or to remove any post after it has been published.

We would be grateful if you would monitor and respond to any comments left on your blog post.

Got an idea?

For more information about the above, or to discuss an idea for a blog post, please contact the blog moderator, Kristina Brousalis.

CLEO recently hosted a new 75 minute webinar for community workers. The webinar shares tips and strategies to help community workers better support their clients who have legal problems. Tools for helping people find good legal information – A webinar for community workers from CLEO Webinars on Vimeo. The webinar, which can be viewed on […]

Guest author Benjamin Miller joins us today to talk about strategies to keep institutional memory within your organization. “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” – Isaac Newton By providing legal education and information, we invite the public to hop on our shoulders to get a better […]

Are you frustrated by evaluations that are required by funders but are useless to you? Or evaluations that tell you things you know but can’t change? Or good recommendations that arrive after your project is finished?

I’m fully convinced of the value of making legal, health, and other forms of public information as clear and easy to understand as possible. Through this blog post, I want to share with you some of the ways I stay up to date. And invite you to get more involved in the plain language world.

Guest author Michele Leering, Executive Director of Community Advocacy & Legal Centre in Belleville, Ontario, joins us today to tell us more information about libraries and justice partnerships. Justice and health partnerships have emerged as an important new strategy for improving “legal health”, and for increasing access to justice for people living on a low […]

How and when does legal information improve access to justice for people in Canada experiencing legal problems? This is the question that CLEO’s Evolving Legal Services Research Project (ELSRP) examines. A three-year study funded by the Law Foundation of Ontario, ELSRP studies the role played by public legal education and information (PLEI) in supporting meaningful […]

We’re pleased to announce an upcoming conference on public legal education and information (PLE) in Toronto on October 20 and 21, 2016. Connect, Create, Communicate: Public Legal Education and the Access to Justice Movement is being hosted by LawConnect and The Action Group on Access to Justice, in collaboration with the PLE Learning Exchange. Connect, […]

How can we best help people in Ontario improve their legal capability – or the ability to recognize and deal with legal problems in their lives? CLEO recently released two new reports that explore this question.

We’ve written here before about the use of games in public legal education and information (PLE) work. Guest author Barbara Hurd, a long-time community legal worker, joins us today to talk about some of her experiences using games in her PLE work. A while back, a group of community legal workers and community legal clinic […]

CLEO recently released a new research report – Public Legal Education and Information in Ontario: Learning from a Snapshot. In our research, we identified an abundance of legal information resources available in Ontario available in Ontario, produced by hundreds of government and community-based providers.

Clients get understandably frustrated when they have to go through a separate intake process at each agency, which can lead to “referral fatigue”. They have to repeat their story three or four times, sometimes more. They’re bounced around like pinballs. It’s vexing for the clients, and inefficient for us.

Accessing the justice system is challenging in numerous ways, particularly in rural and remote communities where the digital divide and sheer geographic distance are major barriers. In contrast, libraries in rural and remote locations are effective access points not only for information but also for programs that reflect community specific needs. This was the starting […]

In our research, we found at least one striking difference between delivery of health information and public legal information and information (PLE) – the focus on prevention. Traditionally, there has been far less focus on delivering preventative-type PLE than health information.

Community Advocacy & Legal Centre – in partnership with CLEO, the Rural & Remote Boldness Access to Justice project and The Action Group on Access to Justice – is hoping to inspire new links between clinics and the library sector to improve access to justice in Ontario’s rural and remote communities.

“We learned that librarians wanted to learn more about what role public library staff could play to connect people dealing with common legal problems to the justice resources that they needed. They were also interested in building their skills at “red-flagging” legal issues and displaying plain language legal information.”

“Over any three-year period, nearly half of all Canadians will experience at least one legal problem. Yet, the justice system is increasingly inaccessible to the majority of Canadians…. we are only beginning to understand the opportunities and challenges that manifest when we begin to view the problem of access to justice through an innovation lens.”

Would you like to make some of your public legal education and information materials available in languages other than English? It’s important to identify priority languages, especially if you have limited resources.

Confused about the difference between legal information and legal advice? We prepared a fact sheet for community intermediaries and workers to help clarify this issue. It describes the difference between legal information and legal advice and gives examples to help non-legal community workers, advocates and other trusted intermediaries understand the difference. This resource is now […]

Trafficked people are extremely isolated, marginalized and attempting to survive in high-risk situations. A new Connecting Communities project is aiming to reach them with legal information about their rights.

We’re pleased to announce that we will be hosting another day of discussion this year. We’re looking forward to sharing experiences with and learning from others who are working to increase understanding of legal rights within communities across Ontario. This event will take place on Monday, June 1, 2015 at the 519 Church Street Community […]

There’s a legal clinic in Toronto called Fair Change Community Legal Services that has been doing amazing work helping homeless people who have faced thousands of dollars in fines. In addition to providing direct service to clients, Fair Change offers legal information sessions to community agencies on ticket issues.

We’ve learned recently about some public legal education and information projects that bring a creative approach to sharing information – literally. They use arts, crafts, games and theatre to help people share stories and information.

The author argues that present approaches to web accessibility, although a good start, are flawed because they focus on what people with disabilities “lack” in ability. In her words, “We need to stop invoking the internal stereotypes we have about who is disabled…. We can reframe accessibility in terms of what we provide, not what other people lack.”

The CBC in Thunder Bay recently profiled an innovative Connecting Communities project – bringing aboriginal elders together through a quilting circle to share stories and learn about social assistance and human rights law. In late January 2015, elders gathered at the Thunder Bay Indian Friendship Centre to unveil a quilt they’d worked on for eight […]

We’d like to share the story of how the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted (AIDWYC) created a graphic novel for youth called “The Jakob Jackson Story: How Jakob Jackson was almost sent to prison for a crime he didn’t commit”.

We were pleased to learn that Clear Language and Design (CLAD), a Toronto organization that provides clear language training and assessment services, recently published a new free resource on their website – a clear language thesaurus.

We are releasing “Evolving Legal Services: Review of Current Literature”, a report prepared for CLEO by Dr. Melina Buckley as part of the planning phase of our Evolving Legal Services Research Project (ELSRP).

“Design is about more than aesthetics. It is a problem-solving approach, just like law is. Design is a set of mindsets, tools, and process that anyone (trained formally in design or not — traditionally “creative” or not) can deploy when faced with a challenge. Just like law school teaches “thinking like a lawyer”, I would advocate we should also be learning how to “think (or better yet — act) like a designer.”

Monica’s team includes a poet and playwright who both love to use storytelling in their work as they develop content and engage with communities. They view stories as a great way to mobilize and enthuse trusted intermediaries and educate them about the legal resources available to their clients.

Whether you’re creating public legal education and information materials, or designing a poster to promote an event, it’s important to choose a font that is readable for your audience. But did you know your choice of font could also affect how credible your content seems?

Less is usually more. We’ve said that many times here, but it’s a principle that can be hard to stick to, especially when you’re busy trying to decode confusing and complicated information for your clients on a daily basis.

Connecting Communities has uploaded links to public legal education and information training materials produced by several Connecting Communities projects. The materials were used to train community intermediaries and front-line workers on various aspects of the law affecting Ontarians in diverse and remote communities.

We at the PLE Learning Exchange want to help support you in developing legal health checks. Visit our new Legal health check page for links to legal health check tools used in Ontario and other jurisdictions.

We welcome Michele Leering of the Community Advocacy & Legal Centre in Belleville, Ontario as a regular guest author for the PLexchange. Michele has recently returned from a self-funded study leave in which she explored approaches to public legal education and information (PLE) and access to justice issues in several different countries, including Australia. She will be joining us once a month to chat about what she learned on her trip.

Are you embarking on a public legal education and information project for the first time? Or, looking for some ideas to refresh your approach to existing projects? Check out this series of information sheets produced by the Victoria Law Foundation in Australia.

Health professionals, like legal service providers and community agencies, must often explain complex and life-altering concepts to the people they serve within very limited time constraints. And, as a recent discussion paper written in the style of a fable points out, this can be very challenging

Choosing language that your audience will understand is only part of your job when producing information. You also have to make sure it’s presented in a logical way, so that it’s clear and easy to understand.

When you’re preparing public legal education and information materials, it’s important to remember that much of what we consider “everyday English” can be confusing for people who are not native English speakers.

Are you designing a training program for community intermediaries to help reach your target audience? No matter how well you know your target audience, it’s important to take the time to conduct a needs assessment before you start to design program content.

Surveys and questionnaires are cost-effective tools to assess public legal education and information (PLE) needs in your community or to evaluate a training session. However, any survey is only as valuable as the number of responses you get from it.

Plain language is quickly becoming the “new normal” in legal writing: direct, simple, and clear. This webinar, hosted by the PLE Learning Exchange, explores practical techniques to create easy-to-understand legal information for the public. Topics covered in the webinar, which lasts just under 1 hour, include: planning legal information projects with audience and purpose in […]

The best way to find out if your information will be useful to your target audience is to “field test” it – or ask them what they think of it before you complete the project. No room in your budget to hire a company to run focus groups? Here are some suggestions for cheap and cheerful ways to test your PLE materials.

Looking for less traditional public legal education and information tools? When METRAC, a Toronto-based charity serving women and youth, wanted to produce an educational tool for young people to challenge sexual violence, they worked with youth to develop a digital quiz game.

Are you preparing public legal education (PLE) print materials? Consider including stories about people – case studies – to help introduce common legal situations in a way that your audience can identify with.

Just when you thought all the hard work on your public legal education and information (PLE) project was done – now it’s time to evaluate your work. It can be easy to see evaluation as only a bureaucratic chore – perhaps because funders often base funding decisions on program outcomes. However, evaluation is not just […]

It can be easy to slip into using jargon when writing public legal education and information materials – especially when you are exposed to it through your daily work. However, jargon can make your information hard to understand for many readers.

Producing public legal education and information (PLE) materials is hard work. But your PLE still needs to be promoted and distributed. Picking the medium or media that your audience is most likely to access can make all the difference.

A lot of legal information focuses on what the law says and doesn’t really tell people what they need to know about the topic. Think about what most members of your target audience need to know, and let these guide you in deciding what basic information to include.

When preparing public legal educational (PLE) materials, it’s important to be aware of differences in provincial and territorial laws and procedures, as well as variations in the names of government departments or other organizations.

My 20-year old son is in the process of entering his first tenancy agreement and has already met with a request from his landlord that violates the law. He’s planning to do a Google search to learn more about tenants’ rights. I asked him how he would assess whether the information he finds is reliable.

When designing PLE, working with agencies from other sectors can help make your materials more relevant to your audience. The Federation of Metro Tenants’ Associations was reminded of the importance of staying close to the ground when working on the Connecting Communities Tenants’ School project in collaboration with settlement agencies.

When I began my work at CLEO at the turn of this century, public legal education and information (PLE) seemed to be an obscure field of work that rarely captured attention in the justice sector. How that has changed!

Connecting Communities is pleased to announce its newest project, Listening and Learning: A Community Legal Information Training Project, sponsored by the Thunder Bay Indian Friendship Centre and Kinna-aweya Legal Clinic.

About Us

The PLExchange blog is an open forum for ideas and exchange of information about public legal education and information (PLE) issues and events. We hope to make this blog a dynamic, friendly and informative space.

Is there a project you’re working on or have heard of that you think others would like to hear about? Any practical tips or strategies that you use in your PLE work? Any PLE topics that you would like to learn more about? We'd love to hear from you.

Guest Post Guidelines

Interested in writing a guest post for our blog about PLE or access to justice initiatives? Click here for some information on how to become a guest author.